Situation: You have a parent pom with defined dependencies in the “dependency management”-section. This way you do not have to provide versions for your dependencies. Standard-Maven-Stuff.

New situation: BUT for some reason you have to switch to another totally different parent pom with totally different “dependency management”-section. Your previously declared dependencies have no version, so there will be errors when invoking maven on this pom.

One solution: A cool thing you can do since Maven 2.0.9 is the import of the “dependency management”. So still no versions required for your previously declared dependencies…

This is accomplished by declaring a pom artifact as a dependency with a scope of “import”.